Last week, we covered the health controversy of holding the 2020 Olympics. Seemingly, the main reason for going ahead is financial. With no fans, a loss of sponsors, reduced viewership, etc., the losses will still be substantial. Today, a look at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as a financial disaster.
How Bad It Is: 2020 Tokyo Olympics as a Financial Disaster
As with other Olympic Games, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were always expected to cause financial losses. But now, the projected losses are off the charts. Due to substantially reduced revenue streams.
According to Niall McCarthy, reporting for Statista:
Cost overruns are the norm for host cities. And estimates show that postponing the games by a year cost Japan $2.8 billion. Of which, two-thirds involved public funding. That has come on top of a project that is already severely overbudget. When the Japanese capital was awarded the Olympics in 2013, the bid committee projected a final bill of $7.3 billion. An amount revised upwards to $12.6 billion in December 2019 before the postponement. Japan’s National Audit Board later reported that the final cost would be far higher at $22 billion. Financial newspapers Nikkei and Asahi claim that the end cost of hosting the Olympics will actually amount to a whopping $28 billion.
Sadly, the enduring legacy of hosting the Olympics is now nothing more than a slew of abandoned and overgrown venues in multiple former host cities. That remains the case to this day in past venues such as Sarajevo, Athens, Beijing, and Rio, to name just a few. Where crumbling stadia and forgotten Olympic villages serve not as proud monuments to athletic achievement, but rather as somber symbols of catastrophic financial mismanagement.
